Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Path: utzoo!telly!druid!darcy
From: darcy@druid.uucp (D'Arcy J.M. Cain)
Subject: Re: Shipping bogus code
Organization: D'Arcy Cain Consulting, West Hill, Ontario
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 90 17:31:21 GMT
Message-ID: <1990Oct24.173121.20610@druid.uucp>
References: <27098@mimsy.umd.edu> <1990Oct22.231028.24623@zoo.toronto.edu> <18632@rpp386.cactus.org>

In article <18632@rpp386.cactus.org> John F. Haugh II writes:
>In article <1990Oct22.231028.24623@zoo.toronto.edu> henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
>>Considering the number of things in (to pick purely random examples :-))
>>SVR4 and SunOS 4.1 that clearly were never tested, I fear Chris is being
>>naive.  Would that it were not so.
>
>I think Henry is being equally naive - if a vendor were required to fix
>every last bug prior to shipping a new release, we'd still be running on
>ENIACs.

Of course some things will get out with a bug or two but that doesn't
excuse the vendor that lets software out the door without even trying
to find all the bugs.  To expand on Chris' example of the car with no
engine, someone should get in the car at the end of the line and turn
the key.  They might miss the fact that there is a vaccum hose missing
somewhere but if a car gets out without an engine then its pretty obvious
that no testing at all was done.  The same with software.  If you run a
system utility and it immediately dumps core then you can safely say that
someone didn't do their job.  If it dumps core only when run at the stroke
of midnight then you can say it has a bug but you can understand why it
wasn't caught by the testing group.

>[ ...]
>There is more to shipping product than finding bugs and fixing bugs - one
>must eventually decide it's soup and send it out to the masses.

Agreed but that point should be somewhat later than the first time make
doesn't return a syntax error and that's all Chris and Henry (by my
reading) were implying.

BTW:  Why did you set follow ups to poster?  Did you feel that no one
could possibly have anything to add to this subject after you posted?

-- 
D'Arcy J.M. Cain (darcy@druid)     |
D'Arcy Cain Consulting             |   I support gun control.
West Hill, Ontario, Canada         |   Let's start with the government!
+ 416 281 6094                     |